Noise from the Basement

If I was a betting man I would bet you work for a small company (99employees or less).  Odds are I would be right half the time.  How did I come up with those numbers?  Using some math and stats I found on the Internet.

About 24% of the working population are public employees (i.e. employed by government).  The remaining 76% are employed by private companies with just a hair under 70% working for a company of less then 100 employees.

Starting a new business is hard.  In 2010 study just over half of new business in Canada survive 5 years or more and only 30% survive 10 years.  Similar statics for our neighbours in the south.

Saturday Morning Productions has been around for 7 1/2 years, if my maths are correct.  Our odds of surviving this long are about 45%.  Another way to look at it is if 100 business opened in 2009 then only 45 are still around today.

Book: Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? Author: Seth Godin

My takeaway from Meatball Sundae is don’t use a new marketing trend because it’s the hip new thing to do.  Make sure the marketing you do aligns with your business.  If the new marketing you does not align either change your business or don’t bother with the new marketing.

The book was written in 2007 and focuses mostly on marketing using the web but the basic idea applies to any new marketing technology.  Just because others companies use dream ads doesn’t mean you need too.

While upgrading the NUnitXmarin project the project maintainers asked me lock the version of NUnit to a specific version.  They where also kind enough to provided a link to a possible solution.  Lets test if it works.

First lets review how NuGet resolves dependencies.  If you specify a dependency version the standard way, i.e. just listing the version number with not brackets, NuGet tries to find the version you specified of the next highest version.

Book: Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy Author: Sheryl Sandberg, Adam Grant

Option B is not what I thought it would be about.  I thought it would be about what to do when your first plan fails for some reason.  Like plans you consciously made, such as a business plan, trip, etc.

Turns out the book is coming up with an option B for plans you didn’t even think you where making.  Such as assuming your family won’t die or won’t get seriously ill.  It is Sheryl Sandberg’s account of her husbands unexpected passing how she dealt with it.  She talks to others who dealt with death of loved ones and also what research says about dealing with death.  It does focus on other issues such as illness and other major life tragedies but mostly about death.